Syndication

Sunday, July 24, 2005

Coming Back is Hard to Do

I usually take Friday afternoon through sometime Sunday or Monday morning to be away from the site. That’s my mental break from the world every week--the time I use to recharge for the work week and appreciate my life away from computers and email and freelance work.

Tonight I had to check my email because I was waiting for something fairly important, and, of course, took a few minutes to check the news and some of my favorite sites.

God, sometimes I wish that I could be one of those people that don’t really care about politics except for those big news moments where you just can’t ignore whatever it is that is on the nightly news. I wish that the news wasn’t about another terrorist bombing--and it’s no comfort that the target was Egypt instead of London or New York.

It’s hard to come back to--and that sounds petty. I’m not the one facing the clean up or the loss of friends and family. I’m not the one that has to deal with the emotional aftermath and fear that can come with living near a place that has been targeted by terrorists. I’m pretty far removed from the worst of the news, and yet I still sometimes have a hell of a time getting something together for Monday morning or even wanting to check the news sites or the RSS feeds.

And reading the warnings and notes from the terrorists is just an exercise in outrage. It’s like hitting Democratic Underground because you want to find something that will piss you off--the Bin Ladens of the world can’t make sense, can’t illuminate, and can’t be anything other than the self-righteous murderers that they are.

“Your brothers, the holy warriors of the martyr Abdullah Azzam Brigades succeeded in launching a smashing attack on the Crusaders, Zionists and the renegade Egyptian regime in Sharm el-Sheikh,” it said.

No, it wasn’t a smashing attack against the evil Americans or Jews or a complicit Egyptian regime. It was just a horrid attack on people who were busy trying to enjoy their lives. Like spoiled children who can’t imagine that the world would balk at giving in to their every whim, they continue to lash out in the most brutal way possible, deluded in believing that they are doing Allah’s will--that what they imagine to be the creator of the universe will actually reward them for killing women and children.

They can honestly say that they will be blessed for the destruction, the dismembered bodies, the death that they leave behind. Coming back to that insanity week after week makes intentional ignorance look pretty attractive at times.

But that won’t make the world any better and it won’t make anyone any safer and it won’t make the terrorists ignore us.

Our hearts are with everyone in Egypt and London who face our common enemy.